![]() ![]() ![]() On a recent overcast, English kind of an afternoon, Stillman met me at the Morgan Library to inspect one of the collection’s treasures: Austen’s handwritten manuscript of “Lady Susan,” which also happens to be the world’s only full surviving manuscript of any of her works of fiction. In the back of his Penguin edition was an Austen novella he hadn’t come across before: “Lady Susan,” which Stillman, now a full-blown Austenophile, at sixty-four, has just adapted into his latest film, “Love & Friendship.” More years went by before he decided to give “Northanger Abbey” another shot. A few years later, on his sister’s recommendation, he took a look at “Sense and Sensibility” and saw the error of his ways. He picked it up as a Harvard freshman and declared Austen overrated. “Northanger Abbey” is the one that did Stillman in. Tom’s problem is with “Mansfield Park”-“a notoriously bad book!”-though, he admits, he’s just taking Lionel Trilling’s word for it. Actually, like Tom Townsend, the brainy Princeton freshman in “Metropolitan,” Stillman’s 1990 movie about young preppies navigating Manhattan’s débutante scene, he used to seriously dislike her. Whit Stillman didn’t always love Jane Austen. The director Whit Stillman helmed the recently released “Love & Friendship,” an adaptation of Jane Austen’s little-known novel “Lady Susan.” Photograph by Bernard Walsh / Amazon Studios / Roadside Attractions ![]()
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